In the early dawn of this year, fire began to spread across the nation. I’m not alluding to the California wildfires. No, I am speaking of the civilians lighting their local Tesla dealerships on fire: windows smashed, Molotov cocktails thrown, bombs installed. People throughout the country who are enraged at Elon Musk’s involvement in our government have been setting fire to Tesla dealerships.
The violence began in the early months of the year with minor offenses such as keying the vehicles and vandalizing showrooms, factories, dealerships, and charging stations. It escalated quickly from vandalizing the cars to burning the showrooms and charging stations, along with targeting the vehicles themselves by shooting at them. In extreme cases, cyber trucks and other cars have been planted with small bombs. Angry words have adorned the outside of dealerships, with words like RESIST and even TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS. Some activists wrote messages on the cars themselves, with content too explicit to be shared here.
Why are people angry? “This is a takeover of our country by unelected billionaires, in a way that is entirely corrupt,” Stephen Loffredo, a protestor and constitutional law professor, told a journalist for The New Yorker. Many share his sentiment. Musk’s position in the executive branch has been the topic of lots of angry discussion since his (maybe) Nazi salute at a rally celebrating Trump’s inauguration. Now, with his new department in Trump’s Cabinet, DOGE (Dept of Govt Efficiency), people are enraged. Particularly, people are angry at the relationship between Trump and Musk, saying that together, “they’re trying to dismantle our democracy.”
Movements have begun nationwide, some calling it the ‘Tesla Takedown.’ Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, calls them something else. “This is fundamentally a case of terrorism,” Musk told The Five on March 25. Only four days later, the grassroots movement called for a global day of action. On March 29th, over 500 acts of aggression occurred nationwide.
Attorney General Pam Bondi has no intention of letting these activists walk. “The days of committing crimes without consequence have ended,” she said, making listeners wonder when she ever considered herself to allow crimes without consequence. Then again, that’s what they threw the Molotov cocktails for – a felon in office appointing billionaires to do his bidding. Nevertheless, Bondi went on to say that three of the defendants found guilty were going to meet the full force of law, possibly seeing up to 20 years in prison. Not only do these “thugs” have the possibility of a double decade sentence, but their own President is suggesting that they spend those years in prisons in El Salvador, “which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!” as Trump stated on TRUTH Social.
This “justice” being threatened makes the people supporting the rebellion even more angry as they compare this response to how the government handled the January sixth rioters. Trump himself claims that “I can tell you. You didn’t have anything like that on January 6th, which is sort of amazing,” claiming that there was no massive injuries or deaths as a result of the Republican riot in the White House in January. This, of course, is not the truth, seeing that 140 Capitol Police Officers were injured, and four of the officers who responded committed suicide soon after the attacks. One officer in particular died after responding to the attack. On the other hand, no one was injured in the three Tesla attacks Bondi spoke of when the issue was first labeled terrorism. Still, all of the rioters and felons on January 6th were federally pardoned when Trump re-entered office, and, in fact, most Tesla-related deaths have happened due to the self-driving features of the vehicle. The danger for protestors comes not just from the federal government, but also at the hands of pro-Trump counter forces. Perhaps, they’ve been emboldened by the pardons. In Florida, a man drove his car toward a group of protestors standing outside of a Tesla dealership, narrowly avoiding killing many people.
It is noticeably ironic that those protesting Musk come from a party that stands for climate aid, and yet are burning and destroying electric cars. While it is extremely destructive and doesn’t actually have any political impact, it has been one of the more noticeable acts of dissent from the people of our country. This is exactly what their intention has been: to cause a scene, to be seen, and to gather all the people angry at the government as well as the people running it. And at that, it has succeeded excellently.
